Severed Heads, Broken Hearts Read online

  I still think that everyone’s life, no matter how unremarkable, has a singular tragic encounter after which everything that really matters will happen. That moment is the catalyst—the first step in the equation. But knowing the first step will get you nowhere—it’s what comes after that determines the result.

  2

  SO WHO WAS I in the aftermath of my personal tragedy? At first, I was a lousy sport when it came to the chipper attitudes of the pediatrics nurses. And then I was a stranger in my own home, a temporary occupant of the downstairs guest room. An invalid, if you will, which is probably the most horrific word I’ve ever heard to describe someone who is supposed to be recuperating. In the context of a mathematical proof, if something is considered “invalid,” it has been demonstrated through irrefutable logic not to exist.

  Actually, I take it back. The word was fitting for me. I had been Ezra Faulkner, golden boy, but that person no longer existed. And the proof?

  I’ve never told this to anyone, but the last night of summer before senior year, I drove over to Eastwood High. It was late, around eleven, and my parents were already asleep. The landscaped lanes of my gated community were dark and inexplicably lonely, in the way that suburbs sometimes get at night. The strawberry fields on the side of the road looked as though they stretched on for miles, but there wasn’t really much left of the old ranch lands—just the small orange grove across from the Chinese strip mall, and the center dividers where last century’s sycamore trees grow in captivity.

  If you think about it, there’s something quite depressing about living in a gated community full of six-bedroom “Spanish-style” homes while, half a mile down the road, illegal migrant workers break their backs in the strawberry fields, and you have to drive past them every morning on the way to school.

  Eastwood High is as far north as you can go within the city limits of Eastwood, California, nestled in the foothills like some sort of stucco fortress. I parked in the faculty lot, because screw it, why not? At least, that’s what I told myself. Really though, it wasn’t a rebellion at all, but a show of weakness—the faculty lot was practically on top of the tennis courts.

  A haze of chlorine drifted over the wall of the swim complex, and the custodial staff had already set up the beach umbrellas on the café tables in the upper quad. I could see them in silhouette, tilted at rakish angles.

  I fitted my key into the lock on my favorite tennis court and propped the door open with my gear bag. My racquet, which I hadn’t handled in months, looked the same as I remembered, with black tape coming loose from the grip. Nearly time for a new one, judging from the dings in the frame, but of course I wouldn’t be getting a new one. Not then, and not ever.

  I let my cane clatter to the ground and limped toward the back line of the court. My physical therapist didn’t even have me on the stationary bike yet, and my other therapist would probably disapprove, but I didn’t care. I had to know how bad it was, to see for myself if it was true what the doctors had said—that sports were finished. “Finished.” As though the last twelve years of my life amounted to nothing more than third-period phys ed, and the bell had rung for lunch.

  I pocketed a ball and prepped my soft serve, that vanilla hit I used so as not to double fault. Barely daring to breathe, I tossed the ball high and felt it connect with the racquet in a way that, while not entirely pleasant, was at least tolerable. It landed neatly in the center of the square without any heat. I’d been aiming for the back right corner, but I’d take it.

  I shook out my wrist, grimacing at how constricting the Velcro brace felt, but knowing better than to take it off. And then I gave the second ball a toss and slammed it, angling the racquet to put a slight spin on the serve. I landed on my good leg, but the momentum carried me forward along with my follow-through. I stumbled, accidentally putting too much weight on my knee, and the pain caught me off guard.

  By the time it had begun to fade back into the familiar, dull ache that never quite went away, the ball had rolled silently to a stop at my feet, mocking me. My serve had faulted; I hadn’t even made it over the net.

  I was done. I left the balls on the court, zipped my racquet back into my gear bag, and picked up my cane, wondering why I’d even bothered.

  When I locked up the courts, the campus felt spooky all of a sudden, the dark shadows of the foothills looming over the empty buildings. But of course there was nothing to be worried about—nothing besides the first day of school, when I’d finally have to face everyone I’d been avoiding all summer.

  Eastwood High used to be mine, the one place where everyone knew who I was and it felt as though I could do no wrong. And the tennis courts—I’d been playing on varsity since the ninth grade. Back when the school was mine, I used to find peace there, between the orderly white lines etched into the forest green rectangles. Tennis was like a video game, one that I’d beat a million times, with the pleasure of winning long gone. A game that I’d kept on playing because people expected me to, and I was good at doing what people expected. But not anymore, because no one seemed to expect anything from me anymore. The funny thing about gold is how quickly it can tarnish.

  3

  THERE ARE A lot of unexpected public humiliations in high school, but none of them had ever happened to me until 8:10 A.M. on that first day of senior year. Because, at 8:10 A.M., I realized that not only did I have no one to sit with during the welcome back pep rally, but I was also going to have to take the front row, since the bleachers were too cramped for my knee.

  The front row was all teachers and this one goth girl in a wheelchair who insisted she was a witch. But there was no way that I was going to hobble feebly up the stairs with the whole school watching. And they were watching. I could feel their eyes on me, and not because I’d won a record percentage of the vote in the class council elections or held hands with Charlotte Hyde as we waited in the coffee line in the upper quad. This was different. It made me want to cringe away in silent apology for the dark circles under my eyes and the fact that I had no summer tan to speak of. It made me want to disappear.

  A balloon arch and butcher-paper sign decorated each section of the bleachers. I sat directly beneath the R in “GO SENIORS!” and watched the leaders of the Student Government Association huddle together in the center of the basketball court. They wore plastic leis and sunglasses. Jill Nakamura, our new class president, was dressed in a bikini top and denim cutoffs. And then the huddle broke apart and I caught sight of Charlotte laughing with her friends in their short Song Squad skirts. Her eyes met mine and she looked away, embarrassed, but that one moment had told me all I needed to know: The tragedy of what had happened at Jonas Beidecker’s party was mine and mine alone.

  And then a small miracle happened and Toby Ellicott sat down next to me.

  “Did you hear about the bees?” he asked cheerfully.

  “What?”

  “They’re disappearing,” he said. “Scientists are stumped. I read it in the newspaper this morning.”

  “Maybe it’s a hoax,” I said. “I mean, how can you prove something like that?”

  “A bee census?” he suggested. “Anyhow, I’m going to buy stock in honey.”

  Toby and I hadn’t really spoken in years. He was on the debate team, and our schedules rarely overlapped. He didn’t look much like the pudgy, bespectacled best friend I’d lost somewhere in the first few weeks of seventh grade. His dark hair still flopped all over the place, but he was a lanky six two. He straightened his bow tie, unbuttoned his blazer, and stretched his legs way out in front of him, as though the teacher bleacher was a choice seat.

  “You should get a sword cane,” he said. “That would be badass. I know a guy, if you’re interested.”

  “You know a sword-cane guy?”

  “Don’t sound so surprised of my shadowy connections, Faulkner. Technically, he deals in concealed weaponry.”

  The music started then, a deafening blast of speaker static that gave way to the opening bars of an overpla
yed Vampire Weekend single. SGA began clapping in that cheesy let’s-get-the-party-started way, and Jill squealed into the microphone how super psyched she was for the best school year ever.

  Inexplicably, SGA launched into some sort of coordinated hula dance in their sunglasses and leis. I couldn’t get over how wrong it was, doing the hula to the African drumbeats of an East Coast prep rock band.

  “Please tell me I’m hallucinating,” Toby muttered.

  “SENIORS, WHERE’S YOUR SCHOOL SPIRIT?” Jill called.

  The response was deafening.

  “I CAN’T HEAR YOU!” Jill challenged, cocking her hip.

  “Kill me now,” moaned Toby.

  “I would, but I seem to be lacking a sword cane,” I told him.

  Mrs. Levine, who was sitting next to Toby, glared at us.

  “Behave or leave, gentlemen,” she snarled.

  Toby snorted.

  When the song finally ended, Jimmy Fuller took the microphone. He was wearing his tennis warm-ups, and I couldn’t help but notice that the team had gotten new uniforms.

  “What’s up, Eastwood?” he boomed. “It’s time to meet your varsity sports teams!”

  As if on cue, a side door to the gym opened and the football team poured out in their pads and jerseys. Behind them was the baseball team, then tennis, then water polo, but by that point, I’d stopped paying attention to the teams and their orders. My former life, in its entirety, was standing in the center of the basketball court while I sat on the teacher bleacher, and there was no way in hell that I was going to clap for them. Mostly, I just wanted to get out of that pep rally, and away from all of it.

  “Hey, Ezra,” Toby whispered loudly. “Got a nicotine patch, buddy?”

  “Get out!” Mrs. Levine demanded. “Both of you—now!”

  Toby and I looked at each other, shrugged, and shouldered our bags.

  It was bright outside, the sky cloudless and impossibly blue. I winced and hung back in the shade of the stucco overhang, fumbling for my sunglasses.

  “A nicotine patch?” I asked.

  “Well, it got us kicked out, didn’t it?” Toby said smugly.

  “Yeah, I guess it did. Thanks.”

  “For what? I wanted to get out of there. Mrs. Levine has awful breath.”

  We wound up passing the time in the Annex, this study room that connected the debate and newspaper classrooms. Everyone else was at the rally, and we could hear muffled screams coming from the gym at regular intervals.

  “It sounds like Disneyland or something,” Toby offered with a grin.

  I was surprised he’d mention it. “Have you been back?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding? I’m there every single day. They gave me a free lifetime pass. I’m like the mayor of Adventureland.”

  “So no, then,” I said.

  “Have you?”

  I shook my head.

  “You could get a handicapped pass,” Toby pressed. “Skip all of the lines.”

  “Next time I ask a girl on a date, I’ll be sure to mention that.”

  For some reason, I didn’t mind Toby giving me crap about the cane. And I was generally pretty sensitive about it. You would be too, if you’d spent most of your summer vacation trying to get your well-meaning but overbearing mother to stop hovering outside the bathroom door every time you took a shower. (She was paranoid that I’d slip and die, since I’d refused to let her install those metal handrails. I was paranoid that she’d come inside and catch me, uh, showering.)

  “What are you doing for Team Electives?” Toby asked. We had a four-year requirement.

  “Speech and debate,” I admitted, suddenly realizing that Toby might be in my class.

  “Dude, I’m team captain this year! You should compete.”

  “I’m just taking it for the requirement,” I said. “Debate’s not really my thing.”

  Back then, my impression of the debate team was that it was a bunch of guys who put on business suits during the weekend and thought they actually had something meaningful to say about foreign policy because they were enrolled in AP Government.

  “Maybe not, but you owe me. I got us out of the pep rally,” Toby protested.

  “We’re even. I told Tug Mason not to piss in your backpack in the eighth-grade locker room.”

  “You still owe me. He pissed in my Gatorade instead.”

  “Huh, I’d forgotten about that.”

  The bell rang then.

  “Hey, Faulkner, want to know something depressing?” Toby asked, picking up his bag. “What?”

  “First period hasn’t even started yet.”

  4

  THE ONE INTERESTING thing about being signed up for speech and debate was that I’d been given a Humanities Odd schedule. Eastwood High is on block scheduling, and ever since freshman year, my schedule had been Humanities Even, with the other athletes. But not anymore.

  I had first period AP Euro, which was unfortunate because 1) Mr. Anthony, the tennis coach, was the AP Euro teacher, and 2) his classroom was on the second floor of the 400 building, which meant that 3) I had to get up a flight of stairs.

  Over the summer, stairs had become my nemesis, and I often went out of my way to avoid a public confrontation with them. I was supposed to pick up an elevator key from the front office; it came in a matching set with that little blue parking tag for my car, the one I was never, ever going to display.

  By the time I got to AP Euro via a rarely used stairwell near the staff parking lot, Mr. Anthony had already begun taking roll. He paused briefly to frown at me over the manila folder, and I cringed in silent apology as I slid into a seat in the back.

  When he called my name, I mumbled “here,” without looking up. I was surprised he’d actually called me. Usually, teachers did this thing when they reached my name on the roll sheet: “Ezra Faulkner is here,” they’d say, putting a tick in the box before moving on down the list. It was as though they were pleased to have me, as though my presence meant the class would be better somehow.

  But when Coach A paused after calling my name and I had to confirm for him that I was in the room even though he knew damn well that I’d walked in thirty seconds late, I wondered for a moment if I really was there. I glanced up, and Coach A was giving me that glare he used whenever we weren’t hustling fast enough during practice.

  “Consider this your tardiness warning, Mr. Faulkner,” he said.

  “So noted,” I muttered.

  Mr. Anthony continued with roll. I wasn’t really listening, but when he got to one name that I didn’t quite catch, there was a perceptible shift in the room. A new student. She sat way on the other side, near the bookshelves. All I could see was a sleeve of green sweater and a cascade of red hair.

  The syllabus was nothing surprising, although Mr. Anthony apparently believed otherwise. He talked about what it meant to be in an Advanced Placement history course, as though we all hadn’t taken AP US History with Ms. Welsh as juniors. A lot of the guys on tennis didn’t care for Coach Anthony, because they thought he was a hard-ass. I was used to strict coaches, but I was quickly realizing that without any other athletes in the class, Mr. Anthony was just plain strict.

  “You should have done the summer reading,” Mr. Anthony said, as though it was an accusation, rather than a fact. “Medieval Europe: From the Fall of Rome to the Renaissance. If you felt such an assignment was beneath you, then you’ll be rearranging your plans for the weekend. You might even consider your weekend plans to be, ah, history.”

  No one laughed.

  The Roman Empire: 200 B.C.— 474 A.D., he scrawled on the board, and then raised an eyebrow, as though enjoying a private joke. There was this horrible stretch of silence as we tried to figure out why he wasn’t saying anything, and then, finally, Xiao Lin raised his hand.

  “I am sorry, but I think 476 A.D. is correct?” he mumbled.

  “Thank you, Mr.—ah—Lin, for displaying the barest level of competency in reading comprehension,” Mr. Anthony snapped, co
rrecting the date on the board. “And now, I wonder if anyone here can tell us why the phrase ‘Holy Roman Empire’ is a misnomer . . . Mr. Faulkner, perhaps?”

  If I didn’t know better, I would have thought that was a sneer on Coach A’s lip. All right, let’s call it a sneer. I got that he was disappointed I couldn’t play anymore, but I’d sort of hoped he wouldn’t be a jerk about it.

  “It only applies after Charlemagne?” I offered, inking over the letters on my syllabus.

  “That’s a community college answer,” Coach announced. “Would you care to rephrase it and try for a UC school?”

  I don’t know why I said it, except maybe that I didn’t want to take crap from Coach A for the rest of the year, but before I could really think it through, I’d leaned back in my chair and replied, “Yeah, okay. Two reasons: One, the ‘Holy Roman Empire’ was originally called the Frankish Kingdom, until the Pope crowned Charlemagne the ‘Emperor of the Romans.’ And two, it wasn’t holy, or Roman, or even an empire. It was really just, like, this casual alliance of Germanic tribal states.”

  I’d never really shot my mouth off in class before, and I instantly regretted it. I usually had the right answer when I was called on, and my grades were good enough, but I wasn’t what anyone would consider brainy. I’d just done a lot of reading and thinking over the summer, because there hadn’t been much else to do.

  “Enjoy your weekend, Mr. Faulkner,” Coach sneered, and I realized that, instead of getting him off my back, I’d made him want to get back at me.

  I’D NEARLY FORGOTTEN we were on Pep Rally Schedule until I was halfway out the classroom door, thinking it was break, and someone tapped me on the shoulder.

  It was the new girl. She clutched a crumpled class schedule and stared up at me, as though I’d somehow given her the impression that I was the right person to talk to on her first day. I wasn’t expecting her eyes—deep and disquieting and dark blue—the sort of eyes that made you wonder if the skies opened up when she got angry.